As Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske, and Smilek point out, bored people become aware of their difficulty concentrating. As a result, bored people often try to amuse themselves by daydreaming and letting their mind wander. Interestingly, while mind wandering helps people to keep their minds occupied, studies suggest that the more your mind wanders, the more bored you feel. The idea is that you recognize that this daydreaming is meant to occupy your mind, and so you realize that the situation is boring.

One more key element of boredom is control. Boredom often occurs when you have little control over your situation. Waiting rooms, lectures, and airline gates are all places where you have little control over your situation. Normally, we react to unpleasant situations by changing the situation. If you don’t like a book you are reading, for example, you close it and do something else. Boredom happens when you are unable to change the situation.

Finally, a real problem caused by boredom is that it leads you to dislike the things that are the object of boredom. In my senior year of high school, for example, I was forced to readMoby Dick. I struggled to get interested in it and spent long hours staring at the pages trying to lose myself in it. To this day, I really do not like Moby Dick. The negative feelings that came with the boredom have stuck to the book.

There’s a crazy action sequence near the beginning ofIron Man 2 in which Tony Stark first meets Ivan Vanko, a rogue Russian scientist wearing a robotic suit and wielding electrified whips. It takes place at the Monaco Grand Prix, where Stark is competing, and Vanko slices up Formula 1 cars like so much toast and puts the hurt on Stark, even after he dons his Iron Man suit. For a minute there, it looks like the supercharged Russian might prevail.

For viewers, it’s quintessential, over-the-top Hollywood action. For scientists, it’s a window into the human brain. At a recent event here hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists got together with filmmakers to discuss what both groups have learned—the scientists through painstaking experiments and analysis, the filmmakers by intuition and experience—about the mechanisms of attention and perception.

In the Iron Man 2 sequence, for example, people are remarkably consistent in where they direct their gaze. Tim Smith, a vision scientist at the University of London, presented eye tracking data collected from 75 people as they watched the clip on a flatscreen. A camera tracked their eye movements, and software created a frame-by-frame heat map. When Smith played the clip with the eye-tracking heat map overlaid, the red hot spot tightly followed the action—people focused on the dueling superheroes, especially their weapons and faces, and on the car parts bouncing around (to see the clip, scroll down to the first video here).

Jon Favreau, who directed Iron Man 2, was onstage with Smith as he presented the clip, and seemed fascinated by it. “Everything you’re looking at is real, and everything you’re not looking at is fake,” he said.

This is valuable at a few different levels. It all comes down to habits and skills. students need this kind of reinforcement from home, school, and other points of contact (clergy, counselors, employers, etc.).

This is valuable at a few different levels. It all comes down to habits and skills. students need this kind of reinforcement from home, school, and other points of contact (clergy, counselors, employers, etc.).

Getting attention for you and your message is tough. You need something that cuts through the clutter and shows rather than tells. Here’s how to do it.A few blocks from my house is a drinking

Sharrock's insight:

from the article: "Everyone is competing for the same thing. Attention. Trying to rise above the clutter just enough to get noticed. To get hired, chosen, or purchased from. Out of a sea of often similar seeming alternatives."

This is an interesting article in large part, because it references thinking that is over 50 years old. The problem is not a new one. What is new is the new scale of information and the lack of voice saying we have to find a a way to come to terms with it.

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Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.